Summer Blockbusters

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These are the films we think you should be seeing this summer and what you need to know when going into them.

There are a ton of highly anticipated movies coming out this year. Here are a few of the films that we think you should not miss, and what you need to know before you hit the theatres!

Prometheus

Film studios who execute well-orchestrated viral marketing campaigns online are awesome. It gives diehard fans something to obsess over and scrutinize during those agonizing months before the film’s release and those that are bored and quasi-interested have something to keep them entertained and hyped up for the film. Prometheus may not be using viral marketing to the same extreme as the 2008 film Cloverfield, whose viral tie-ins with the film were the stuff of legends, but Fox films have released a really great fictional TED conference clip as well as a website for Weyland Industries, the same company responsible for both expeditions, Prometheus and Nostromo, the commercial towing spaceship from Alien. This must be one of the “strands of Alien's DNA, so to speak” that Ridley Scott was talking about.

The Dark Knight Rises

It’s sad that the Batman story is coming to an end, but hey, maybe we’ll get a nonsensical reboot like Spiderman! If you’re late to the Batman game, you should really do things right by picking up some of the comic books that coincide with the final chapter of the Dark Knight’s story. There are three series from which The Dark Knight Rises drew inspiration. The first is The Dark Knight Returns, written in 1986, in which a 55-year-old retired Bruce Wayne returns to fight crime as the anti-hero Batman after a ten-year hiatus. The second is the comic book series Knightfall, first published in 1993, which tells the six-month story of Batman and the “super steroid” bad guy Bane, the inaudible face mask guy from the trailers. The third is No Man’s Land, published in 1999, in which Gotham City suffers a major earthquake and is overrun by villains.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

We can all collectively agree that we’re ready for a film that villainizes and slaughters vampires. In 2009, writer Seth Grahame-Smith penned a rather interesting novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which combined Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice (1813) and modern zombie fiction. Eventually landing a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list, it was announced that an undisclosed major film company had bought the rights to the book to produce it as a feature film. While everyone waited, Grahame-Smith started adapting other major stories into horror fiction. In 2010, he wrote Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which caught the attention of pretty much everyone who wasn’t drooling over the sparkly vampires from Twilight. Directors Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov and Kunal Hashmi all got together to purchase the rights to the film and decided to develop the entire thing themselves. Surprisingly, they even hired Grahame-Smith to write the script.

Moonrise Kingdom

Expect yet another flawlessly executed masterpiece this summer from the most neurotic man in showbiz, Wes Anderson. If you’re not familiar with his work, we strongly suggest going to iTunes and checking out The Royal Tenenbaums to fully grasp the meticulous work that’s at play in Anderson’s films. Whether it’s the costumes, dialogue or set design, this guy has fully developed a world of his own. To get the feel for how the separate parts of the film were developed in his latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom, Focus Features has set up a very in depth website where they speak with costume designer Kasia Walicka Maimone about where she drew inspiration for dressing everyone from Bill Murray to Tilda Swinton in the film. Another important piece to note on the site is how Anderson, Maimone and art director Gerald Sullivan all worked together to grasp the essence and inescapable Anderson quirk of the sixties summer in which Moonrise Kingdom is set. And how can you not love your very own set tour by Bill Murray? It’s like hanging out with your cool grandpa who’s half in the bag, telling you stories from yesteryears.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Not all movies have to be based on books, you know. With the average American citizen spending 32 hours per month on the internet in 2010, it’s about time a film was based off a popular internet meme. The comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, starring Aubrey Plaza and Jake M. Johnson, is based on a meme that goes by the same name. Originally appearing in The Copenhagen Post, the (real) ad eventually made its way onto the internet to be passed around from friend to friend. The first “Safety Not Guaranteed YTMND”, a popular site that hosts a lot of user-generated pages, was created on October 27th 2005 and since then has been the topic of YouTube videos, Wikipedia vandals, and was even read by the late movie trailer voice artist Don LaFontaine.